Educating for the Anthropocene

The work of environmental educators and activists in India and South Africa offers new models for schooling and environmental activism. Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity's future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind's unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices. He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis. The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals, says Sutoris. Researchers must look outside conventional models and practices of education for inspiration if education is to live up to its responsibilities at this critical time. For decades, environmental activist movements in some countries have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world. Sutoris highlights an innovative research methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. It is through their capacity to imagine the world differently, Sutoris argues, that education can reinvent itself

Educating for the ‘Anthropocene’: The Meaning of Politics in an Age of Slow Violence

This multi-sited ethnographic study examines the interface of education and environmental activism in spaces affected by the slow violence of environmental degradation, characteristic of the current high ‘Anthropocene’ era. By conducting research at government schools and in their surrounding communities in Pashulok, India, and South Durban, South Africa, this study investigates the impacts of schooling and environmental activist movements on young people’s ‘phenomenologies of meaning-making’ about the environment. Building on the work of Ricœur and Arendt, the theoretical framework illuminates the role of historical responsibility, intergenerational justice and political imagination in shaping young people’s understandings of and responses to the slow violence affecting their communities locally and the planet globally. This framework is operationalised through established ethnographic methods, including observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups, a fieldwork diary, and through an innovative intervention of observational filmmaking workshops conducted with young people in both sites. The findings point to the depoliticising and individualising effects that bureaucratised state-run education systems in both India and South Africa have on young people’s political and environmental imaginaries, specifically in relation to action and change. They suggest further that young people recognise this slow violence impacting on the environment and have ideas about the political transformation needed to achieve an environmentally sustainable future. These alternative imaginaries are in some cases shaped by the activist presence in the community, as well as educators who intentionally subvert the curriculum. Environmental activists in Pashulok and Wentworth strive to expand what Ricœur calls the ‘horizons of the possible’ and to foster pluralistic political action in the process of community deliberation. The study argues that educating in the Anthropocene calls for bridging schooling with elements of activism to develop what Arendt refers to as agonistic pluralism, which is necessary for finding answers to the slow violence of the Anthropocene

Politicising ESE in postcolonial settings: the power of historical responsibility, action and ethnography.

This article argues that the mission of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is inherently political and that, by not acknowledging this, ESE interventions risk becoming part of the problem of sustainability rather than the solution. The article offersa theoretical framework for thinking about the (de)politicising effects of ESE rooted in three key elements: historical responsibility, action and the postcolonial condition. This framework builds on Ricoeur's phenomenology, Arendt's theory of action and the work of postcolonial scholars in arguing for a grounded understanding of ESE, which necessitates the use of ethnographic methods in ESE research

Photodynamic Therapy of Xenotransplanted Human Tumours

SUTORIS, Karol. Fotodynamická terapie xenotransplantovaných lidských tumorů. [Photodynamic therapy of xenotransplanted human tumours]. Prague, 2015. 168 pp. Doctoral Thesis. Charles University in Prague, Third Faculty of Medicine, Department of Surgery Faculty Hospital Královské Vinohrady. Lector GÜRLICH, Robert. Language Czech. In todays clinical practice oncological indications of photodynamic therapy (PDT) are limited primarily to palliative treatment and are used as an adjunct to conventional oncosurgical routines with the aim of improving the quality of life and prolonging patient survival. The efficacy of experimental PDT on xenotransplanted human tumours has been proven in our in vivo study on nu/nu mice. One particular cell line of mammary carcinoma (MDA-MB-231) and two biologically different cell lines of prostate carcinoma (LNCaP, PC- 3) were tested. The key aspect of our experiment was the application of newly developed photosensitizer - hydroxy-aluminum phthalocyanine (AlOH-Pc) in the form of liposomal gel designed for locotopical application. Therapy achieved complete remission in 90% of mice with mammary carcinoma xenografts and in 100% of those with prostate carcinoma xenografts. The new photosensitizer, unlike the older ones, has minimal drug-light interval and does not cause..